This is why I appreciate the $15 an hour minimum wage movement. Paying people more is better then taxing the rich more. The super-rich own congress but at the city and State level there is depending upon the state some room to grow wages. Higher wages equals fewer people on public subsidies which is good for cities and states.
If the minimum wage is a universal solution works for everybody, why are there so many exemptions and carveouts? Family-owned businesses like restaurants are exempt, self-employed individuals are exempt, piecemeal farm labor is exempt, babysitters and other "occasional" labor have their own exemption, tipped workers have a carveout.
There's a special rate for minors because apparently nobody thinks high school kids will produce $15 of value per hour yet they still need to learn the ropes of the business and personal responsibility somehow.
The problem is that if you set a minimum wage that is higher than the real value of the work performed, it means those jobs just simply won't exist anymore.
The real value of a lot of products and services is more adjustable than your statement would lead someone to believe. Reality is absolutely not an efficient marketplace that immediately culls jobs and workers the moment a certain price of labor threshold is reached.
What labor has value below the required amount to exist as a human? I think the reasoning is - if it's worth being done, it's worth paying someone a meager living wage to have it done.
While I agree in principle, the counter-argument is that you're just going to end up with that job going overseas or getting automated. Basically, if you need something done and it's only worth $10/hour to you to have it done, but no one near you will do it for less than $15/hour, either 1) it won't get done and that $10/hour economic input is lost, or 2) you'll find a way to get it done for $10/hour or less via means other than employing a local human.
And when outsourcing happens, you tax the fuck out of that business transaction, and with the proceeds pay your unemployed laborers a livable minimum income. You think Chinese labor is cheap for no reason? There are tons of gov't subsidies, from straight up handouts to nonexistant labor laws (which are a form of subsidy to big business at the expense of workers, a reverse tax).
The same should apply to automation. The inordinate inequality of wealth which is bound to happen with automation should be alleviated through heavy taxation. Or if tax is too dirty a word, ownership of such dual capital/labor should be partly socialized--i.e. newly created AI/robot companies must put up a % of their shares to the public who receive equal amounts.
I think this is only true in a closed system. In an open, globalized world like we have today, the price of the output doesn't have to go up if another place with cheaper labor can produce the same output for cheaper. Thus is many cases you end up with a situation where you can't raise the price of your output because your customers will just buy the foreign-produced version.
Unless that cost was "digestible" by the system, but had simply been previously going to C-level and board members' salaries. Then companies which continue to pay execs exorbitantly, and companies which give their execs a 0.001% pay cut or otherwise reduce inefficiencies to absorb the cost increase will compete.
That's the point: there is almost certainly work being done now for $10/hr that is not economically worth being done if the lower limit by statute is $15/hr.
If someone is capable of holding down that $10/hr job but not capable of landing a $15/hr job, they are harmed by an increase in minimum wage in two ways: 1. The direct loss of job, income, status. 2. They are now shopping in an economy where the goods/services they purchase are likely to be marginally more expensive.
>If someone is not capable
That mindset continues to be disgusting to me. Humans are some of the most impressive creatures on Earth; baring actual disability, you can teach them to do all sorts of things.
I'm going to love watching the tech scene's existential panic over the next 2 decades as the population increasingly realizes that making CRUD apps and junk SAS is a job many Americans are more than capable of doing.
The dirty secret is that there's a whole class of jobs, mostly decently paying white collar jobs, that have most of the training on the job.
Hell most of the jobs that only require an undergraduate degree involve extensive on the job training; college is used as a weak signal for aptitude, interest, and class not really capability (this is the entire business model around coding boot-camps).
I got about 3 days of on-the-job training, pitched at showing generally skilled programmers the company's specific tools, practices, and environment. The rest was just being thrown into the normal day-to-day work, with the expectation that I'd ask more questions and make slower progress at first.
You can't just throw a laid-off factory worker into that position, though I agree, you can probable prepare him to handle it more efficiently than a 4-year BS degree program, which is what bootcamps are looking to capitalize on.
It matters a great deal to the employee to have been put in a situation like that before (homework & hobby projects) and developed a decent intuition & familiarity. It matters a great deal to the employer to know that that the candidate has done something like this before and will be substantially likely to succeed. There's a little more going on here than class signaling.
All labor which could be done by people in, say, Vietnam or Laos, has value below the required amount to exist as a human in USA. So, more and more of it.
This is entirely a consequence of economic policy set the by the US government. Not some immutable property of our world. As such it can be changed through, for example, a more progressive tax policy.
Seattle's socialist member of the city council fired the Unversity of Washington team after the results came out and hired an anti-capitalist professor from berkeley to ensure the study finds the right results.
Please don't use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that (regardless of which flavor they favor) because it's destructive of what HN is for.
Why stop there? Just make it 100$ and hour and everyone will be rich!
This argument -- "well, if you think a little increase in the minimum wage is good, then you must think any increase in the minimum wage is good, or you're not being consistent!" -- gets trotted out by somebody on HN every time the subject comes up. And c'mon. If I believe that San Francisco's minimum wage hikes to $14 and $15 an hour are not going to cause undue economic collapse here, that does not somehow obligate me to believe "hey, if that works, we can raise the minimum wage to ELEVEN BILLIONTY DOLLARS AN HOUR with minimal impact, too!" Real life is full of examples, from salt in your soup to water behind a dam, where we understand that's good to increase the level to a point, but only to a point.
Oh wait, arbitrary wage increases don't really work out in real life.
"Most past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs." That quote is...from the FiveThirtyEight article that you linked to. The evidence so far seems to be that some of the time, for some levels, minimum wage increases do really work out in real life. The UW study criticizes the methodology of past studies, but it's at least worth acknowledging that there's criticisms of the UW study which are not, despite Fox's take, "this is not the result the socialists wanted." Notably, UW's study excludes businesses with multiple locations but only one account with Washington State's unemployment office, which eliminates 38% of the state's workforce from consideration, including all chain fast food and retail workers. They exclude them specifically because they can't get "___location-based" data for workers in those cases; while that may be true, being inconvenient to UW's methodology doesn't render that data irrelevant.
> Real life is full of examples, from salt in your soup to water behind a dam, where we understand that's good to increase the level to a point, but only to a point.
And somehow this point is lost on many proponents of raising the minimum wage, who find obvious that any increase in minimum wage can only be good and anyone saying otherwise is evil. Sometimes the soup would be better with less salt, minimum wages could be too high already!
Note that your fivethirtyeight article even mentions a caveat to the study:
> The paper’s findings are preliminary and have not yet been subjected to peer review. And the authors stressed that even if their results hold up, their research leaves important questions unanswered, particularly about how the minimum wage has affected individual workers and businesses.
> Many economists, meanwhile, have acknowledged substantial uncertainty over the likely effects of the recent wage hikes. Most — though by no means all — past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs. But those studies were mostly based on minimum wages that were much lower than the ones beginning to take effect now. Even some liberal economists have expressed concern, often privately, that employers might respond differently to a minimum wage of $12 or $15, which would affect a far broader swath of workers than the part-time fast-food and retail employees who typically dominate the ranks of minimum-wage earners. Other economists said there simply wasn’t enough evidence to predict the impact of minimum wages that high. The new laws in Seattle and other cities, then, could provide an ideal testing ground.
Additionally, here is a post by Jared Bernstein related to the minimum wage hike[0]. Here is the book mentioned in the aforementioned post [1].
Another analysis[2] finding that "Once this publication selection is corrected, little or no evidence of a negative association between minimum wages and employment remains."
While I also do not know for certain the effects of a minimum wage, one of your sources fairly lists caveats and uncertainty for the study it mentions, and the other is fox news.
This post is an insult to hacker news. You are not deploying any kind of rational logic. If $100 is good, then make it $1,000,000. That is your logic and it is dishonest at best.
